The National Lottery of new beginnings

5.01: I hadn’t thought about this funny little Ewan Macgregor short for probably 12 years, when I was a pseudish sixth-former and it came on Channel 4 before Shallow Grave. Right between the main feature and those Stella Artois adverts with the horses. But it popped into my head as I was toddling through the flat in my dressing gown just now.

It’s a morning like most. The radio crackled into life – Global Briefing on the World Service. I turned in my bed like an oil tanker and head-butted the pillow. Then I crumpled onto the floor and flopped around, tangling myself half into the struggling eel of a dressing-gown, and tottered to my feet. In the kitchen, I flicked the kettle and fired up the computer, which – as you’ll know if you ever get up at 5 to do stuff with computers – is painful to look at for the first few seconds of its electronic glaring.

Now what?

Every other morning I’ve got up knowing where I am and in which direction I ought to be heading, but not today. “This morning,” I thought, “feels a bit like standing in swimming trunks and googles before a mighty hail-spitting ocean, trying to work up the courage to dip in a toe.”

And then I imagined dipping the toe, and, as I dipped it and recoiled from the cold, a great slithering finger of sea came galloping out, gripped me around the ankles, and dragged me feet-first into its planet-sized belly.

And that’s what brought the Ewan Macgregor film to mind.

And that’s you fully up to date with everything that’s happened this morning until we get to me typing this sentence.

So where to begin? Which of the National Lottery balls of undercooked ideas should we try plucking from machine Lancelot tonight? The Burglar story? The Stalker story? The Politician story? The Bob Dylan story? I’m half tempted to hold an impromptu poll. Vote Stalkers: they’re full of surprises.

Actually, I’ve got a better idea: I’m going to pull the names out of a hat.

Here’s the hat:

And the winner is:

So, best get to it. I’ve got mistresses to stuff into a Fedex parcel.

6.55: So, a few things I have learned this morning. First, you go much quicker at the start of things than at the end. Second, it’s still worth getting up at 5am, even when you no longer have a job to go to. There’s fewer distractions here. And third (strictly speaking, this one’s a realisation rather than a lesson): It occurred to me that I should really have had an idea called “The Rabbit Story.” Imagine the fun we’d have had if I’d pulled a rabbit from the hat.